Sometimes, actually, war is the answer
Hugo Gurdon
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Immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, left-wingers repeated the slogan “War is not the answer” like an incantation, asserting that the United States should not respond with violence against Islamists who’d murdered 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.
As someone aptly and icily retorted, however, “That depends on the question.”
You cannot judge what the right answer is if you don’t bother to consider the question that precedes it. If you already know your answer, if it is the one you’re willing to give under any circumstances, you have not thought about the issue and are mouthing a vacuous slogan reflexively.
This comes to mind now as the Left calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, by which it means Israel should abandon its intention to destroy Hamas, which it formed after the terrorist organization murdered, raped, tortured, decapitated, and kidnapped more than 1,400 Israelis and others on Oct. 7.
Calls for a ceasefire are, as I’ve written before, a hypocritical humanitarian mask to conceal the grotesque features of Jew-hating terrorist sympathizers.
Why isn’t war the answer? Especially if the question is, “How can we punish the perpetrators and ensure they are never in a position again to repeat their vile and depraved attacks?” War might very well be the answer. Indeed, it is a logical and appropriate answer of people everywhere except, it seems, on university campuses.
The latest grotesque detail revealed as Israelis undertake the grim task of collecting and burying their dead — you must excuse a detail almost too appalling to write — is that Hamas murdered a baby by baking it in an oven while its mother could hear its screams and was herself being raped.
This atrocity has not been confirmed but seems likely to be true, for it was told by Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah, an Israeli emergency service organization, who is not the type to retail wild and unfounded propaganda.
There are many factors Israel should consider and is considering in its response to 10/7 — its own 9/11 — and some of these counsel against all-out invasion and occupation. Would such an operation, for example, stretch Israeli resources, including manpower, so far as to crush the Israeli economy? Could Hamas indeed be eradicated? Would Israel’s position in the world be damaged rather than improved even by a successful campaign if there were massive civilian casualties despite every reasonable effort being made to avoid them?
None of these calculations include or should include moral qualms about killing every member of Hamas. That would be a service to Israel, to Palestinians, and to the world, to humanity, and one hopes against hope that it might deter other Islamic State-like jihadis, at least for a while.
But no one can reasonably argue that it is morally proper to allow the continued existence of an organization committed to genocidal crimes. It is, indeed, a moral shortcoming to suggest such a thing.
In America and the Western world, we tend to flinch at high passions such as rage and outrage as somehow beneath our level of civilization. Such powerful feelings are often left deliberately unacknowledged for fear of seeming crude, uneducated, and simply low. But that is an error. There are enormities to which a restrained response is grossly and culpably inadequate. Looking at what Hamas did and is still doing, we are not required to sink into madness or foam at the mouth, but we should be filled and motivated by a civilized fury. We should direct that just fury with determination against the people who have provoked it.
It is depraved to make excuses, as the Left does, for what Hamas perpetrated. What we saw this month was not justified resistance to Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine. (There is no occupation, by the way, and indeed, no Palestine).
Hamas’s atrocities were motivated by something wholly different than the desire to fight for a Palestinian state, indeed something different, too, than even the desire to eradicate the state of Israel. It is motivated, as clip after video clip reveals, by visceral and taught racial hatred. Watching Hamas thugs crow and congratulate themselves over the prone body of Shani Nicole Louk, a German Jew they seized and violated on 10/7, it is clear their motivation was not political. Hearing that one of them baked a baby in an oven — aping Nazi atrocities of 75 years ago — you know you are face to face with sadistic feral glee.
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This is what Hamas, with the shameful complicity of the United Nations, indoctrinates Palestinians to feel. It is a moral deformity that cannot be neutralized by negotiation, by half-measures, or by taking the supposedly more civilized road to peace.
It cannot be cured. It can only be expunged by lethal force.